Thursday, April 2, 1998 | 10:57 a.m.
"She said, 'So you're stocking up on toy cellular phones? Do you run a preschool?'," Paoli said.
Not exactly. Her husband, Mark, needed some parts from the phones to make "beeping" Easter eggs.
The invention will allow children with impaired vision, like the Paolis 4-year-old son, Gus, to have their own special Easter egg hunt this year.
The "Beeping Easter Egg Hunt" will take place at 1 p.m. Saturday at Elko Presbyterian Church. All visually impaired children and their families are invited to attend. The afternoon also will include a regular Easter egg hunt and Annie the Clown will be on hand to make balloon animals for the kids.
The Elko and Spring Creek Lions Clubs, which work to provide services for the vision impaired, along with Full House Inc., are sponsoring the event.
Lions Club members helped make the beeping eggs and the candy-filled eggs that will be carefully hidden in nooks and crannies around the church.
Mrs. Paoli, a nursing instructor at Great Basin College, said she had heard of centers for the blind holding beeping egg hunts, but when she called the centers, no one seemed to know how to make the special eggs.
So she had her husband put his engineering talents to work in designing an Easter egg that made noise. That's where the toy cellular phones came in.
The Paolis and Lions Club members tried out their new invention on Gus, now a preschooler at Great Basin College's Child and Family Center.
"He loves them," Mrs. Paoli said. "He thinks they're great."
The family has always had Easter egg hunts for Gus and his 6-year-old sister, Mallary, but Gus always had to work twice as hard, Mrs. Paoli said.
"He needed a lot of verbal cues to locate the eggs," she said.
Gus was born with coloboma microphthalmia, an under development of the eyeballs, and is blind in one eye. Paoli said she and her husband encourage Gus to use what vision he has as much as possible. He's also learning Braille and works with a vision teacher to improve his orientation and mobility.
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